This invention relates to a system and method of identifying tracking, measuring and managing positive or negative comments published on the internet regarding an entity and more particularly a system and method whereby comments regarding an entity are identified and disclosed to the entity according to an anticipated priority in the need to address the comments.
Every day, thousands of bits of information are entered onto the Web that impact business by affecting the “social reputation” of an entity or an entity's products and services. Consumers write product reviews and talk about products and brands on customer forums. Bloggers write about companies and launch commenting streams. People in social networks discuss new products and trends. The media posts news on companies and products and invite users to respond. In the case of large companies, there may be hundreds or thousands, of such social media incidents every week that affect the company directly, its competitors, or the market at large. Some incidents are positive, some negative. Some are highly influential, some meaningless. The challenge for any company is to keep the important and relevant incidents on the radar at all times, and to deal with these issues effectively by tracking the incidents, measuring and prioritizing them, delegating them to trained employees for engagement, and tying in 3rd party experts, such as a PR firm, when necessary.
According to one aspect of the disclosure, a system for measuring and managing distributed online conversations accessible via a network comprises memory and an online conversation monitoring system communicatively coupled to the network and communicatively coupled to the memory. The online conversation monitoring system is configured to create and manage search topics and queries, to search sites on the network utilizing the search topics and queries to identify relevant online conversations related to an entity, to capture relevant online conversations related to the entity, to store in the memory each captured relevant online conversation as a discrete incident associated with the entity to which it is relevant, to score each discrete incident according to a set of metrics, and to present scored incidents to the entity to which relevant online conversation relates.
According to another aspect of the disclosure, a method of measuring and managing distributed online conversations accessible via a network includes creating search topics and queries to be utilized in searching media sites accessible via the internet to identify online conversations relating to an entity; storing the created search topics in memory accessible by a search device coupled to the internet; searching media sites on the interne utilizing the stored created search topics and queries to identify relevant online conversations related to the entity; capturing relevant online conversations related to the entity discovered in the searching step; storing in memory each captured relevant online conversation as a discrete incident associated with the entity to which it is relevant; accessing the memory in which each captured relevant online conversation is stored to score each discrete incident according to a set of metrics; and, presenting scored incidents to the entity to which relevant online conversation relates via a graphical user interface generated by a server communicatively coupled to the memory.
Some embodiments of the disclosed systems and methods of tracking online conversations provide the operational framework and technology to help entities track and effectively manage social media incidents. Reputation affecting social media incidents are one subset of “online conversations” and not the only one of importance. For example, trends in opinion about market direction may not impact “social reputation” but are nonetheless important. Some embodiments of the disclosed systems and methods of tracking online conversations gather and sift through thousands of incidents every day, filtering out the incidents that are relevant to entities, prioritizing those incidents that warrant attention, and routing them to the right people for tracking and resolution. Some embodiments of the disclosed systems and methods generate appropriate reports describing the social media incidents discovered for delivery to an impacted entity
Some of the disclosed systems and methods of tracking online conversations rely on both technology and human intelligence. Computers excel in helping gather and track human communications. Some of the disclosed systems and methods of tracking social reputation utilize data processing technology to identify and organize media incidents. Analysts excel at decoding the subtleties of meaning of media incidents.
Additional features and advantages of the invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon consideration of the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment exemplifying the best mode of carrying out the invention as presently perceived.